


how to love a broken woman

by bucksnatalia



Series: soviet spouses drabbles [4]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel, Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bucky Barnes' Notebooks, Captain America: Civil War Spoilers, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Civil War (Marvel), Diary/Journal, F/M, Implied Sexual Content, POV Second Person, Past Brainwashing, Post-Captain America: Civil War, Red Room, buckynat - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-18
Updated: 2016-03-18
Packaged: 2018-05-27 11:04:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6282124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bucksnatalia/pseuds/bucksnatalia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"In his backpack there are a dozen notebooks that compose the scattered memories dating back to as far as he can remember which somewhat piece together a scattered life." </p>
<p>Bucky Barnes knows what it's like to have something torn from his mind, so when there is something important he knows he cannot let anyone take from him, he writes it down and keeps it safe. His feelings for Natasha fall under this category. </p>
<p>Takes place in a canon divergent universe assuming he survives Civil War and he and Natasha end up together (contains some spoilers from the Civil War trailer). Context is up for interpretation. He could be writing it shortly after Civil War, could be reading it after Widow Hunt... that much is up to you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	how to love a broken woman

It started half a century ago when you first saw her strike a man twice her size to the ground in a rush of twisting limbs and snapping bones. He crumbled in an agonized heap on the mat while she landed softly on her feet, her expression never changing – until she caught the way you stared and curled her lip as if to tempt you to test her next. You would never admit it, but that frozen heart of yours skipped a beat.

You never stood a chance.

They always told you that you were not meant for these sorts of things – the things that normal people got to have in their normal lives. You’d never had a normal life, or if you had you couldn’t remember it. Neither had she. You have that in common.

They always told you that you could not have these things and you always listened, but when she came along their voices were silenced in favor of hers. She never spoke to you the way they did – her voice was always playfully taunting, teasing, something you would have despised had it come from anyone else. But you, you would’ve let her tease you endlessly if it meant you could listen to her another moment longer. If voices were music, hers was your favorite tune.

She asked you once when the two of you were alone what she should call you, and you told her that you had never been anything but the Winter Soldier. She looked at you then with those eyes of her, with such intense curiosity you could’ve drowned in her gaze, and when she called you her Soldier you couldn’t help but kiss the name off of her lips. You had always thought of it as the title of a killer, of something to be feared. You never realized it could sound so sweet.

You never knew that the breathy sound of it, whispered in your ear as your bodies writhed and twisted together in a tangle of sheets and limbs, could make you tremble down to your bones.

They always told you that there were no others out there like you. Your talents and skills were unmatched. You were the best, the strongest, and things like love would only weaken and distract you. That was why you could not have those things – they were not meant for people like you. You could not afford to be weakened by love.

And yet she made you feel stronger than you ever had – loving her gave you a high unlike any other and you were addicted to it. You were addicted to the way she could make you feel not like a weapon, but like a man, and you were addicted to the way she could liberate and strengthen the human inside you just as easily as she could bring you to your knees. You didn’t think you believed in God, but you believed in her and you believed in the ecstasy you felt when she answered the silent prayers you would murmur into her skin.

From the moment you met her you were doomed, because people like you were not meant to love and there were always people prepared to keep you from slipping.

But that never kept you from trying.

You laid beside her sleeping frame one night, when you knew your time with her was running out. A rush of thoughts kept you from joining her in dreams – for longer than you will ever admit to her you contemplated placing your hand on her naked shoulder and shaking her awake and taking her away from this place forever. You thought out every detail in the back of your mind – where you would go, how you would get there, what you would do once you had arrived.

But she slept so peacefully that you couldn’t bear to remove her from the rare bliss of rest, and so you continued on watching her, noting the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed and the softness of the moonlight shining onto her pale skin through the blinds and the way her blazing red locks splayed out across the pillows like flames. You couldn't help thinking that she was fire and the ice around your heart had melted. You couldn't help thinking that soon you would both be burning.

The sun had not yet risen when you left her there to wake in a cold, empty bed.

The next night she told you that she had sworn years ago that she would never cry, no matter how much she felt she needed to. She was a woman ahead of her time, and the men she worked for would never see her strength if she allowed herself to show such weakness. She told you this after you told her that your handlers knew about the relationship, and it took every ounce of restraint you possessed in that miserable soul of yours to keep yourself from wrapping her in your arms when she couldn’t look at you.

You didn’t know how to love her then. You didn’t know how to love anything then. You barely knew what love was before they took it away from you again.

Over the next fifty years you saw her every so often, but you didn’t understand why the sight of her in the corner of your vision always seemed to turn your head, or why her voice sounded so familiar, or why you noticed the emptiness in your chest when she disappeared again. They wouldn’t let you understand it, so you learned to stop asking.

You saw her once in Odessa and the sudden wave of recognition the sight of her behind the wheel of a vehicle transporting your target distracted you long enough to result in a botched shot. Instead of the bullet soaring straight through the windshield and the target’s skull, you shot out her wheels. They both tumbled over the edge of a cliff. You saw her look up at you, you saw the same sense of recognition you had felt cross her own blood-streaked face, and you saw her step in front of your target in a vain attempt to protect him from you.

So you shot him through her and you watched them both fall with a sick feeling in your stomach. Not that it mattered, because they made you forget it all a few hours later.

You met her again in Washington D.C. and this time the familiarity worked to your advantage – sort of. You knew the sound of her voice, you knew her fighting style, you could’ve spotted her fiery hair from miles away – but she recognized you, too.

You would’ve been impressed if you weren’t so enraged.

You shot her again with a vague sense of déjà vu – but _everything_ about that mission felt familiar to you, and when the man from the bridge called you by a name that couldn’t have been yours, you were too confused to think about much of anything else.

Not that it mattered, because they made you forget that, too.

It was another two years before you saw her again, but by then you were remembering more. Nothing concrete – just flashes of fights and her flaming red hair – but at that point all of your memories were precious to you. You wrote them all down; sometimes you would spend whole days copying down every memory that had slunk its way into your muddled brain and you kept them close to you wherever you went. They had taken your memories from you countless times before – they had taken your life from you so often they made you believe you were incapable of having one – and you would not allow them to do it again.

It wasn’t until you were fighting her yet again, after all this time, that you realized you were suffering, because the sight of her brought back memories of a time you felt almost _happy_.

Later, when you were strapped to a hospital bed to keep you from injuring anyone, yourself included, after the battles had finally ended, she sat beside you and kept the others from questioning you or accusing you. She promised you everything would turn out alright, that you would get a new arm soon, that they weren't going to keep you prisoner like HYDRA had. She didn’t mention knowing you, before, and neither did you – because your life was a mess, because the memories of her you could recall were so scattered you barely knew all of what had transpired, because you had seen the way a best friend from another life suffered by remembering a man who couldn’t remember him and couldn’t bear the thought of putting yourself through that kind of pain on top of everything else you were feeling.

When they finally let you go and you realized for the first time in over seventy years what freedom felt like, she walked beside you for hours while you relearned the city you didn’t know you’d grown up in.

When you had your worst days, when the memories and the guilt became too much and you could barely bring yourself to leave your bed, let alone go fight bad guys, she would plan some impromptu adventure for the two of you to keep you distracted until you could breathe again without wondering why you bothered.

It wasn’t until she had saved you from yourself a dozen times over that she asked you what you remembered, and you told her everything. The truth passed over your lips like a sigh of relief, like it had been waiting for ages to be spoken, and when she kissed you and told you that she remembered you, too, you realized with her back turned away from you that you were smiling.

You finally worked up the nerve to ask her out to dinner the next day, and you found yourself smiling again when she said yes.

For an entire lifetime you had believed that you could not love because you were a weapon and weapons were not designed to love things. You could not love because you had been taught a thousand ways to kill a person but you had never learned to _love_ one.

But every moment she spent with you she was teaching you, and you didn’t even realize it. You didn’t know that all those years ago she taught you to open your heart because with her it felt so natural you hardly realized you’d done it. You didn’t know when she held your hand and rubbed your shoulders to soothe you out of your nightmares that she was teaching you how to be loved. You didn’t know when she danced barefoot with you in the kitchen of the first apartment you ever shared with her that she was teaching you that you deserved it.

Most of all, you didn’t know how much you needed to be taught until she awoke drenched in sweat, throat raw from screaming, and red prints on her shoulders left by your hands from their desperate attempt to shake her out of whatever horrors you couldn’t save her from.

This woman taught you that something as broken as you could be loved, and in doing so she taught you how to love something just as broken.

You cannot fix her, just like she cannot fix you. You cannot mend each other because you don’t think either of you was ever really whole in the first place. But you can love her – you can kiss each of her fingers despite the blood they have spilled, because yours have spilled more and if she can forgive you your sins then you can do the same. You can hold her against your chest when she grows weary of the world, you can ease her out from behind the walls she’s built around herself so that she can rest in your arms where she will always be safe. When she tells you that she is a monster, you can tell her that she is perfect, and when she doesn’t believe you, you can tell her that she has saved you more times than you can count and no matter what she thinks of herself she will always be your angel.

She cannot be fixed, and neither can you – but she taught you a long time ago that your jagged edges fit with hers, and that you do not need to be fixed to be loved.


End file.
